I am quite suprised that nobody has mentioned Ruby?
It seems like a very obvious language choice for perlmonks, looking for a bit more clean oo aproach.
I am an old newtonscript (self inspired prototype based oo language) hacker, and find Ruby to contain most of my favorit oo features(along with some nice new stuff, such as their iterator concept) combined with most of my favorite Perl features...

A search on Ruby didn't show nuch of any real discussions about Ruby on this site.. do people not know or care about Ruby??
Update : even the super search only returns 3 nodes containg the word ruby... *scary*

I've been interested in learning Ruby, especially since
I'm studying programming languages. The particular features of the language that interest me are the smooth (imo) object handling and string handling. I need to find
a project (and the time) to sit down and actually put Ruby
to use, though...

For those who have not heard of Ruby, the Ruby Home Page is a good place to start. Also, for FreeBSD users, there are already quite a few Ruby resources available in the Ports collection.